PHA-Exchange> Global Health Watch - a review

[Claudio]

From: bala at haiap.org
Global Health Watch  2005 - 2006   An alternative World Health Report
About this book
  Today's global health crisis reflects widening inequalities within and between countries. As the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, advances in science and technology are securing better health and longer lives for a small fraction of the world's population. Meanwhile children die of diarrhoea for want of clean water, people with AIDS die for want of affordable medicines, and poor people in all regions are increasingly cut off from the political, social and economic tools they can use to create their own health and well-being.
  The real scandal is that the world lacks neither funds nor expertise to solve most of these problems. Yet the predominance of conservative thinking and neoliberal economics has led the institutions that were established to promote social justice into imposing policies and practices that achieve just the opposite. They police an unjust global trade regime with a doctrinaire insistence on privatization of public services, and preside over the failure to curb disease by tackling the poverty that enables it to flourish.
  Global Health Watch 2005-2006 is a collaboration of leading popular movements and non-governmental organizations comprising civil society activists, community groups, health workers and academics. It has compiled this-alternative world health report - a hard-hitting, evidence-based analysis of the political economy of health and health care - as a challenge to the major global bodies that influence health. Its monitoring of institutions including the World Bank, the World Health Organization and UNICEF reveals that while some important initiatives are being taken, much more needs to be done to have any hope of meeting the UN's health-related Millennium Development Goals.
  The report also offers a comprehensive survey of current knowledge and thinking in the key areas that influence health, focusing throughout on the health and welfare of poor and vulnerable groups in all countries. These issues range from climate change, water and nutrition to national health services and the brain drain of health professionals from South to North.
  Global Health Watch 2005-2006 is above all a call for action, written in a clear, accessible style to appeal to grass-roots health workers and activists worldwide, as well as to international policy-makers and national decision-makers. Its resource sections advocate actions everyone can take, while its recommendations show how better global health governance and practice could work for Health for All rather than health for the privileged few.
  
'A very good reference work for people working in areas affecting the health of populations. It deals with some of the most important issues in today's world. I highly recommend it.' - VicenteNavarro, Editor-in-Chief, International Journal of Health Services
'Combines academic analysis with a call to mobilize the health professional community to advocate for improvements in global health and justice. I hope it will be read by many health professionals in rich and poor countries alike.' - Professor Andy Haines, Director, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
'Governments and intergovernmental organizations have structured our social world so that half of humankind still lives in severe poverty. These global poor suffer vast health deficits due to inadequate nutrition and lack of access to health care, safe drinking water, and clean sewage systems. Each year, some 18 million of them, including 10 million children under 5, die from preventable or treatable medical conditions - accounting for one third of all human deaths ... This greatest moral outrage of our time will continue until citizens reflect on its causes and firmly place the human rights of the global poor on the political agenda. Global Health Watch 2005-2006 is a courageous and promising effort in this direction.' - Thomas Pogge, Professorial Research Fellow, Centre for Applied Philosophy, Australian National University
'Global Health Watch 2005-2006 offers a critique of global trends that threaten health including the practices of multinational corporations, the false promise of the genetics revolution, the scandal of hunger in a world of plenty and the failure of UN institutions such as WHO to live up to their original mission to promote the health of poor people. Global Health Watch shows clearly that whether we are healthy or not is deeply rooted in our political, economic and social structures. More important, it also demonstrates, with practical suggestions, that another world is possible. It will become the essential guidebook for health activists who want to campaign for a kinder, more equitable, healthier and people-centred world.' - Fran Baum, member of the WHO Commission on the Social Determinants of Health 'A much-needed resource, unique, and reflecting the work of well-qualified authors from all continents. I applaud the effort - and the result.' - Philip R. Lee, MD, Consulting Professor, Stanford University
  
Each chapter can be downloaded, or the whole document accessed at http://www.ghwatch.org/2005report/ghw.pdf 

The Medicines chapter is at http://www.ghwatch.org/2005report/B2.pdf

Global Health Action 2005-2006 (the associated campaign tool) is at http://www.ghwatch.org2005reportGlobalHealthAction0506.pdr

Global Helath Watch 2005-2006 could be downloaded from http://www.ghwatch.org/2005_report_contents.php 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://phm.phmovement.org/pipermail/phm-exchange-phmovement.org/attachments/20060828/91458a32/attachment-0001.html>